Improving order-picking operations with precedence constraints through efficient storage location assignment: evidence from a retail company

This paper is inspired by a manual picking retail company where shape and weight constraints affect the order-picking process. We proposed an alternative clustering similarity index that considers the similarity, the weight and the shape of products. This similarity index was further incorporated in a storage allocation heuristic procedure to set the location of the products. We test the procedure in a retail company that supplies over 191 stores, in Northern Portugal. When comparing the strategy currently used in the company with this procedure, we found out that our approach enabled a reduction of up to 40% on the picking distance; a percentage of improvement that is 32% higher than the one achieved by applying the Jaccard index, a similarity index commonly used in the literature. This allows warehouses to save time and work faster.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Integrated Models and Tools for Design and Management of Global Supply Chain

In modern and global supply chain, the increasing trend toward product variety, level of service, short delivery delay and response time to consumers, highlight the importance to set and configure smooth and efficient logistic processes and operations. In order to comply such purposes the supply chain management (SCM) theory entails a wide set of models, algorithms, procedure, tools and best practices for the design, the management and control of articulated supply chain networks and logistics nodes. The purpose of this Ph.D. dissertation is going in detail on the principle aspects and concerns of supply chain network and warehousing systems, by proposing and illustrating useful methods, procedures and support-decision tools for the design and management of real instance applications, such those currently face by enterprises. In particular, after a comprehensive literature review of the principal warehousing issues and entities, the manuscript focuses on design top-down procedure for both less-than-unit-load OPS and unit-load storage systems. For both, decision-support software platforms are illustrated as useful tools to address the optimization of the warehousing performances and efficiency metrics. The development of such interfaces enables to test the effectiveness of the proposed hierarchical top-down procedure with huge real case studies, taken by industry applications. Whether the large part of the manuscript deals with micro concerns of warehousing nodes, also macro issues and aspects related to the planning, design, and management of the whole supply chain are enquired and discussed. The integration of macro criticalities, such as the design of the supply chain infrastructure and the placement of the logistic nodes, with micro concerns, such the design of warehousing nodes and the management of material handling, is addressed through the definition of integrated models and procedures, involving the overall supply chain and the whole product life cycle. A new integrated perspective should be applied in study and planning of global supply chains. Each aspect of the reality influences the others. Each product consumed by a customer tells a story, made by activities, transformations, handling, processes, traveling around the world. Each step of this story accounts costs, time, resources exploitation, labor, waste, pollution. The economical and environmental sustainability of the modern global supply chain is the challenge to face

A Review of Codebook Models in Patch-Based Visual Object Recognition

The codebook model-based approach, while ignoring any structural aspect in vision, nonetheless provides state-of-the-art performances on current datasets. The key role of a visual codebook is to provide a way to map the low-level features into a fixed-length vector in histogram space to which standard classifiers can be directly applied. The discriminative power of such a visual codebook determines the quality of the codebook model, whereas the size of the codebook controls the complexity of the model. Thus, the construction of a codebook is an important step which is usually done by cluster analysis. However, clustering is a process that retains regions of high density in a distribution and it follows that the resulting codebook need not have discriminant properties. This is also recognised as a computational bottleneck of such systems. In our recent work, we proposed a resource-allocating codebook, to constructing a discriminant codebook in a one-pass design procedure that slightly outperforms more traditional approaches at drastically reduced computing times. In this review we survey several approaches that have been proposed over the last decade with their use of feature detectors, descriptors, codebook construction schemes, choice of classifiers in recognising objects, and datasets that were used in evaluating the proposed methods

Decision models for fast-fashion supply and stocking problems in internet fulfillment warehouses

Internet technology is being widely used to transform all aspects of the modern supply chain. Specifically, accelerated product flows and wide spread information sharing across the supply chain have generated new sets of decision problems. This research addresses two such problems. The first focuses on fast fashion supply chains in which inventory and price are managed in real time to maximize retail cycle revenue. The second is concerned with explosive storage policies in Internet Fulfillment Warehouses (IFW). Fashion products are characterized by short product life cycles and market success uncertainty. An unsuccessful product will often require multiple price discounts to clear the inventory. The first topic proposes a switching solution for fast-fashion retailers who have preordered an initial or block inventory, and plan to use channel switching as opposed to multiple discounting steps. The FFS Multi-Channel Switching (MCS) problem then is to monitor real-time demand and store inventory, such that at the optimal period the remaining store inventory is sold at clearance, and the warehouse inventory is switched to the outlet channel. The objective is to maximize the total revenue. With a linear projection of the moving average demand trend, an estimation of the remaining cycle revenue at any time in the cycle is shown to be a concave function of the switching time. Using a set of conditions the objective is further simplified into cases. The Linear Moving Average Trend (LMAT) heuristic then prescribes whether a channel switch should be made in the next period. The LMAT is compared with the optimal policy and the No-Switch and Beta-Switch rules. The LMAT performs very well and the majority of test problems provide a solution within 0.4% of the optimal. This confirms that LMAT can readily and effectively be applied to real time decision making in a FFS. An IFW is a facility built and operated exclusively for online retail, and a key differentiator is the explosive storage policy. Breaking the single stocking location tradition, in an IFW small batches of the same stock keeping unit (SKU) are dispersed across the warehouse. Order fulfillment time performance is then closely related to the storage location decision, that is, for every incoming bulk, what is the specific storage location for each batch. Faster fulfillment is possible when SKUs are clustered such that narrow band picklists can be efficiently generated. Stock location decisions are therefore a function of the demand arrival behavior and correlations with other SKUs. Faster fulfillment is possible when SKUs are clustered such that narrow band picklists can be efficiently generated. Stock location decisions are therefore a function of the demand behavior and correlations with other SKUs. A Joint Item Correlation and Density Oriented (JICDO) Stocking Algorithm is developed and tested. JICDO is formulated to increase the probability that M pick able order items are stocked in a δ band of storage locations. It scans the current inventory dispersion to identify location bands with low SKU density and combines the storage affinity with correlated items. In small problem testing against a MIP formulation and large scale testing in a simulator the JICDO performance is confirmed

The edge cloud: A holistic view of communication, computation and caching

The evolution of communication networks shows a clear shift of focus from just improving the communications aspects to enabling new important services, from Industry 4.0 to automated driving, virtual/augmented reality, Internet of Things (IoT), and so on. This trend is evident in the roadmap planned for the deployment of the fifth generation (5G) communication networks. This ambitious goal requires a paradigm shift towards a vision that looks at communication, computation and caching (3C) resources as three components of a single holistic system. The further step is to bring these 3C resources closer to the mobile user, at the edge of the network, to enable very low latency and high reliability services. The scope of this chapter is to show that signal processing techniques can play a key role in this new vision. In particular, we motivate the joint optimization of 3C resources. Then we show how graph-based representations can play a key role in building effective learning methods and devising innovative resource allocation techniques.Comment: to appear in the book "Cooperative and Graph Signal Pocessing: Principles and Applications", P. Djuric and C. Richard Eds., Academic Press, Elsevier, 201

Multimedia delivery in the future internet

The term “Networked Media” implies that all kinds of media including text, image, 3D graphics, audio and video are produced, distributed, shared, managed and consumed on-line through various networks, like the Internet, Fiber, WiFi, WiMAX, GPRS, 3G and so on, in a convergent manner [1]. This white paper is the contribution of the Media Delivery Platform (MDP) cluster and aims to cover the Networked challenges of the Networked Media in the transition to the Future of the Internet. Internet has evolved and changed the way we work and live. End users of the Internet have been confronted with a bewildering range of media, services and applications and of technological innovations concerning media formats, wireless networks, terminal types and capabilities. And there is little evidence that the pace of this innovation is slowing. Today, over one billion of users access the Internet on regular basis, more than 100 million users have downloaded at least one (multi)media file and over 47 millions of them do so regularly, searching in more than 160 Exabytes1 of content. In the near future these numbers are expected to exponentially rise. It is expected that the Internet content will be increased by at least a factor of 6, rising to more than 990 Exabytes before 2012, fuelled mainly by the users themselves. Moreover, it is envisaged that in a near- to mid-term future, the Internet will provide the means to share and distribute (new) multimedia content and services with superior quality and striking flexibility, in a trusted and personalized way, improving citizens’ quality of life, working conditions, edutainment and safety. In this evolving environment, new transport protocols, new multimedia encoding schemes, cross-layer inthe network adaptation, machine-to-machine communication (including RFIDs), rich 3D content as well as community networks and the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays are expected to generate new models of interaction and cooperation, and be able to support enhanced perceived quality-of-experience (PQoE) and innovative applications “on the move”, like virtual collaboration environments, personalised services/ media, virtual sport groups, on-line gaming, edutainment. In this context, the interaction with content combined with interactive/multimedia search capabilities across distributed repositories, opportunistic P2P networks and the dynamic adaptation to the characteristics of diverse mobile terminals are expected to contribute towards such a vision. Based on work that has taken place in a number of EC co-funded projects, in Framework Program 6 (FP6) and Framework Program 7 (FP7), a group of experts and technology visionaries have voluntarily contributed in this white paper aiming to describe the status, the state-of-the art, the challenges and the way ahead in the area of Content Aware media delivery platforms